Grief and Gratitude

Some of you might think, at first blush, what on earth do grief and gratitude have in common?? I have experienced a variety of kinds of grief, from losing beloved fur-family members to losing my grandparents, to losing a parent, to losing several very close friends, and to losing siblings (yes, plural). And there is a link between grief and gratitude (more on that later; for now, I’ll address grief).

Grief has a way of twisting you, of bending you in ways you probably never even thought of. It breaks you, and if you make it out the other side, it can make you, too. I’m talking about the kind of grief that makes you feel like you cannot breathe, cannot get enough air, a grief where you don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, you have no clue you’re even in a tunnel.

Grief of this magnitude can make one feel all alone in the dark, with no way out. I posit that if you can get even a smidge unstuck and move around in the dark, sooner or later, you’re going to find the train tracks. And maybe you follow them the wrong way at first, but if you persevere, you will find that there really IS light at the end of that tunnel. You WILL come out of the vast depths of your grief. Life may never be quite the same, but it’s worth fighting for, and the person you are mourning would never want you to become collateral damage. Let me repeat that: the person you are mourning would never want you to give up in their absence.

So, grief: in my experience, the closer the bond was in life, the greater the grief after death. However, there can be major exceptions to this rule. For example, an adult who was adopted as a child may experience profound grief upon finding their biological mother has passed when they finally track her down. Your experience of grief may not (actually, almost certainly won’t be) the same as another person – even someone in a similar situation. Meaning, you may grieve a parent in a whole different way than, say, a friend who loses her parent – or even your sister, even as she grieves the parent you both lost.

Some basic things grieving people have in common. If you’re familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, you can skip to the next paragraph. For those of you who’ve never heard of her and her five stages of mourning, here goes: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Though she arranges the stages of the grieving process in the order above, I'm far from the only person who has noted that while the order is a helpful guide, it’s rarely that linear. One can, for instance, after seeming to “graduate” by achieving acceptance, bounce back to depression – even to denial. If that’s you, give yourself some grace: there’s no “right” way to grieve.

This is where I say probably the most important thing in this blog: don’t force yourself to “get over” your grief. That brings up an important distinction I like to make: instead of saying one “gets over grief,” try saying one “gets through grief.” To me, grief is a living, fluid being.

There are days when I miss people who have died so much I can’t breathe; other days, I’m able to find comfort in happy memories. And, on occasion, not-so-happy memories – just comes with the territory; you cannot siphon off the difficult times and just remember the good times. AND, you are NOT a bad person for remembering the bad times. I miss my sister with a vengeance, but at the same time, I remember how she could hold onto a grudge like nobody’s business. Am I a bad person for remembering this? No – I’m human: I remember the good and the bad, and that’s NORMAL, not disloyal.

One of the most destructive and harmful things that you can do is to try to make someone who has passed into a “perfect” person, a sort of saint. My mother recalls that my late grandmother made my older brother into a veritable saint after he died. I was born after he died, so I didn’t know him. My mom has told me lots of stories about him, and he wasn’t perfect in more than a handful of those stories. She has always maintained that he was a really special child (the kid who broke up fights at recess), but that he wasn’t perfect.

Grief certainly makes gratitude difficult. I wish I could say I take my own advice and treat myself gently when I’m grieving, but it’s so much easier to be angry at the person who has died for leaving you, and angry at yourself for somehow not stopping the person from dying. Once you begin to let yourself grieve, however, you get to feel gratitude towards the person who has died. Gratitude for their role in your life, gratitude for the memories, gratitude for what you learned from them.

People come in and out of our lives in many sizes, shapes, and forms. And loss is NOT just about death. You can mourn your still-living parent who has dementia; you can mourn the end of your marriage; you can mourn the loss of your friend when the friendship ends; you can mourn the end of a therapeutic process with your therapist.

And here, and I’m sure I’ll get flak for this, but I believe it's true: you can mourn an animal (dog, cat, horse, or whatever furry creature you have and love) with the same intensity as you would a human. Pets can be lifelines when you are too depressed to interact with other people, and they can bring you back from the edge when you just cannot relate to other people.

So, while grief can be ugly and scary and seemingly never-ending, know that you WILL get through it. And that while you might stumble through Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grieving, you WILL survive. You will never stop missing someone who was important to you, but you will learn how to live without them – and know that doing so doesn’t mean you didn’t love them, or that you’re being disloyal. Anyone worth missing would want you to go on and live as big and joyful a life as you are able. Enough said.